Tanking Vacation: Arms PvP

Back from your fury vacation already? It sure was fun seeing all those numbers pop up all over the place every time you hit Cleave or Whirlwind wasn’t it?

But maybe you’re not ready to tank again quite yet.

Maybe you’re still craving more, I’m sure you’re itching to introduce yourself to other living, breathing digital people who’ll soon be left on the ground in little pieces in your aftermath.

So let’s take a look at the life of an Arms PvP warrior and take an extended break. Don’t worry, your raid will be there when you return.

While there are some variations in the spec based on preference, THIS is the basic spec that you’ll use. A few of the variations comes from whether or not you prefer to have Improved Hamstring in arms or Blood Craze in fury but other than that, they all play basically the same.

To compete without getting completely blown up in arenas, you’re going to want to gather together enough PvP gear to hit the 1k resilience mark while keeping your other stats as high as possible. Remember, just like with Fury, it’s not about stacking one stat or the other but about keeping a balanced mix. You’ll want that armor pen and the strength to be as high as possible with the crit rating taking a backseat.

There’s a shift in mentality to take into consideration too. With fury, the goal was to have as high sustained DPS as possible. In a PvP setting, burst is the way to go. Now what I mean by burst isn’t necessarily crit. In PvP, as your victims try hilariously to run away from you, you don’t have constant uptime to smash in their face. So you have to capitalize the brief moments you DO have to do as much of the face smashing as possible.

There are a couple of ways to achieve this goal.

The main one is something that you control in which you try to line up as many attacks as possible. You can try to keep Rend applied on your targets before you try to burn them down as this will save you a precious GCD while their in range. You can wait half a second for your Overpower to light up again before hitting them with Overpower and Mortal Strike in quick succession for a nice two hit combo. You can even line up a big one the next time you see your Improved Hamstring (if you took it) proc on an enemy by hitting them with an Overpower/Mortal Strike and following that up with a Bladestorm while they’re still stationary. By the time the storm ends, your Overpower will most likely be ready again with Mortal Strike following shortly after. That makes for a pretty hefty amount of damage that most classes won’t live through without some immediate assistance.

Keep in mind too that in an arena, the name of the game is team play. Learn to rely on your partner and be someone that your partner can rely on. Don’t go chasing an enemy halfway across the map while they nuke your partner to glass and don’t be afraid to call for assistance catching an enemy or CCing a healer before you unleash your combo.

The more you and your partner or partners work together and trust each other, the more of a leg up that you’ll have on your unorganized opposition.

Now go take another week off from tanking and see how the face smashing side of life lives.